Alys, Always (2 page)

For once, I’m glad to be in the office. I get in early and sit at my desk, sipping the cappuccino I picked up at the sandwich bar on the corner. The cups are smaller than the ones you get at Starbucks but the coffee is stronger, and today, after a bad
night’s sleep, that’s what I need. I look at my emails and check the queue: a few people have filed copy over the weekend, but not as many as had promised they would.

You’d have thought working on the books pages of the
Questioner
would be a doddle, that the section would more or less run itself; but every week it falls to me to rescue some celebrity professor or literary wunderkind from hanging participles or apostrophe catastrophes. I’m a subeditor, an invisible production drone: always out in the slips, waiting to save people from their own mistakes. If I fumble the catch I’ll hear about it from Mary Pym, the literary editor. Mary is at her best on the phone, buttering up her famous contacts, or at J. Sheekey, where she takes her pet contributors as compensation for the disappointing nature of the
Questioner
’s word rate.

One day, it is assumed, Mary’s expenses (the cabs, the first-class train tickets, the boutique hotels she checks into during the literary festival season) will have to be curtailed, as those of the other section heads have been. But for now, she sails on regardless. Stars still want to write for Mary, despite our dwindling circulation and the mounting sense that it’s all happening elsewhere, on the net.

No sign of Mary yet, but Tom from Travel is in, and we exchange hellos. Monday is a quiet day at the office: the newsroom on the west side of the building remains peaceful and empty until well into Tuesday. At the point when my weekend begins, when I’ve sent the books pages to press on Thursday afternoon, the newsroom is just starting to come to life, limbering up for the final sweaty sprint to deadline in the early hours of Sunday morning. Once or twice I’ve done a Saturday shift on the newsdesk, and it’s not to my taste: the swearing and antler-locking, the stories that fall through at the last minute, the eleventh-hour calls from ministers attempting to reshape a page lead. I always associate deadlines
with the sour smell of vinegar-soused chips eaten out of polystyrene shells, a smell that is circulated endlessly by the air conditioning so that it’s still just perceptible this morning.

Mary arrives, her coat over one arm, her enormous handbag open to show off the gigantic turquoise Smythson diary in which she keeps all her secrets. She’s on her mobile, unctuously attending to someone’s ego. ‘I’ll get it biked round immediately,’ she says. ‘Unless you’d rather I had it couriered out?’ She cocks her head to one side, manhandles the diary on to my desk, and makes a note in her exquisite copperplate. ‘Absolutely!’ she says, nodding and writing. ‘So thrilled you can do this. There is the
worry
that he’s going off the boil rather. I’m sure you can make sense of it for us.’

She ends the call and moves on to her desk without acknowledging me. ‘Ambrose Pritchett is doing the new Paul Crewe,’ she murmurs a few moments later, not looking around, as her terminal bongs into life. ‘Filing a week on Thursday. Can you get the book to him before he leaves for the airport at ten forty-five? He wants to start it on the flight.’

I look at the clock. It’s nearly ten already. I don’t know where the preview copy is, and I know I can’t ask Mary. That sort of thing drives her up the wall. (‘Do I look like a fucking librarian, darling?’) So I ring the courier desk and book an urgent bike, and then I start to search through the shelves where we store advance copies. I try to file books by genre and alphabetically, but as neither Mary nor her twenty-three-year-old deputy Oliver Culpeper (every bit as bumptious as he is well connected) can be bothered with that approach, it’s not exactly a foolproof system. Eventually I find it, nudged behind Helen Simpson and the confessions of a coke-head stand-up with whom Mary shared a platform at Hay last summer. By the time I’ve written a covering note and shoved the Crewe in a padded envelope and taken it down to the
couriers’ office, it’s quarter past. I’m standing in the elevator lobby, looking at my reflection in the stainless steel doors, when my mobile rings. I don’t recognise the number.

‘Frances Thorpe?’

‘Speaking,’ I say. Somehow I know it’s the police. It all comes back, the feeling of last night: the dark, the rain, the uselessness. I swallow hard. My throat is dry. In the doors, I see a pinched, nervous-looking girl, with blue shadows under her eyes: a pale, insignificant sort of person.

‘I’m Sergeant O’Driscoll from Brewster Street police station. My colleagues in Fulbury Norton have passed on your details. It’s with regard to the road traffic accident last night.’

‘Oh,’ I say, as the lift doors open. Road traffic accident. Why do they say that? What other sort of accident could there be on a road? ‘I’ve been thinking about her. Alice, I mean. Is there any news? How is she doing?’

‘We were hoping you could come down to the station, so we could go through your statement with you,’ he says. ‘Just to make sure you’re happy with it. Just in case anything else has occurred to you in the meantime.’

‘Well, yes, I could do that. I don’t have anything more to say. I’ve told you everything. But if it’ll help … How is she?’ I say again.

There’s a little pause. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Miss Thorpe, but she was very badly injured in the incident. She died at the scene.’

‘Oh,’ I say. Then, ‘How awful.’

The lift doors part on the fifth floor and I go back to my desk and write down the details on a Post-it.

At lunchtime, I leave the office, wrapping my red and purple scarf tightly around my throat and pulling it up over my mouth against the slicing cold, and start to walk, skirting the mainline station with its multiple retail opportunities, passing the old gasworks and the new library, cutting down
several Georgian terraces and crossing the canal with its motionless skin of litter. Every so often, I walk by a café or a cheap restaurant with steamed-up windows, and the sound of coffee machines and cutlery comes out as someone arrives or leaves, and then the door swings shut and the sound dies away.

Once I get off the main roads, not many people are about. It’s a bleak white winter day: the trees are bare, the patches of municipal grass are scuffed and balding, patrolled by the more desperate sort of pigeon. Now and then the cloud thins enough for a suggestion of the sun to appear, a low ghostly orb behind the council blocks.

At Brewster Street reception, an empty room without any natural light, there’s no one behind the security window. I wait for a few moments and then I go and knock on a door, and a cross-looking woman comes to the screen and says Sergeant O’Driscoll’s on his break and should be back soon. Annoyed, I take a seat on a moulded plastic chair and, by the fizzing, popping illumination of a strip bulb, work my way through the sticky pages of an old
Closer
.

After a while I hear doors opening and shutting, and the buzz of a security lock being released, and then O’Driscoll comes out to fetch me, still licking his fingers and chewing the last of his lunch. He’s young, as Wren was last night, maybe in his mid or late twenties. Younger than me, with lots of product on his hair, a raw sort of complexion, and spots on his neck. He takes me into a side room and pushes some pages over the tabletop: Wren’s notes from last night, typed up, fed through a spellchecker and emailed across the country in a fraction of a second. I read through them carefully while O’Driscoll taps his teeth with a biro, and though of course she hasn’t caught my tone of voice or my turn of phrase, the facts are all correct and unarguable. ‘I’ve got nothing to add,’ I say, putting my hand flat on the report.

‘It all seems pretty straightforward,’ O’Driscoll says, passing me the pen, along with the whiff of falafel. ‘If you could just sign – there. The reports are only preliminary at this point, of course, but all the scene evidence confirms your account of what she told you. The driver tried to avoid something in the road, and the black ice, unfortunately, did the rest. And if she was travelling at speed, of course …’

He lets the words hang in the air while I scribble my name on the line.

‘There’ll be an inquest, but it’s just a formality. I doubt you’ll be needed,’ he says, pulling the papers back to his side of the table and rapping them officiously against the Formica so they stack up, then rising to his feet. ‘Well, thank you for your assistance. Get in touch if anything else comes to mind.’ He stands back, holding open the door for me. ‘Oh, there is one more thing I should mention,’ he adds, as I wind the scarf around my neck and shrug myself into my backpack. ‘There’s a chance the family will want to make contact with you. It can be useful for – you know – closure.’ I can tell that he’d like to be making ironic speech marks with his fingers, but knows this would be inappropriate. ‘Part of the grieving process. After all, as I understand it, you were the last person to have a, um, conversation with her. Would you have a problem with that?’

‘No, I … I don’t think so,’ I say, not at all sure how I really feel about this.

‘Great stuff. Well, if the family wants to be in touch, they’ll do so through the FLO.’

‘Who?’

‘Oh, sorry – the Family Liaison Officer. Anyway, they may not feel the need. We’ll play it by ear,’ he says, slotting the biro back into his pocket. ‘This may well be the end of the matter.’

I stop in the doorway. ‘Who was she?’ I ask, reminded
how little I know about her, this person who spoke her last words with only me to hear them. ‘What can you tell me about her?’

He sighs briefly, probably thinking of the cup of coffee cooling on his desk, and flips back through the report. ‘So, Alice Kite,’ he says, running a finger down the text. ‘Mid-fifties. House in London and a weekend place, looks like, near Biddenbrooke. Married with two adult children.’ Then he’s shaking hands, and saying goodbye, and I’m back out in the cold, retracing my steps to the office.

As I walk, I hear her saying again, ‘You’re very kind’: an easy remark it had sounded at the time, but now I know how much it must have cost her. It seems strange that I know little more about her than the automatic associations that come with a certain sort of voice, and turn of phrase, and make of car.

Maybe this will be the end of the matter, as O’Driscoll said.

‘Oh, no, you poor thing!’ says Hester. She’s the first person I’ve told. I have no particular confidantes at work, and I didn’t want to call up anyone else simply so I could drop it into the conversation; but I do feel a relief, a lessening of tension, now I’ve finally put it into words.

‘So you were coming back from Mum and Dad’s, and you just saw the wreck on the road?’

‘Well, sort of.’

‘Jesus,’ she says. ‘Was it, you know, traumatic? Could you see everything? Was she in distress?’

I know Hester’s really asking: was she covered in blood? Was she
screaming
? She sounds almost disappointed when I describe the scene, the oddly formal nature of my conversation with Alice, which in any other circumstance might
be comical. ‘How are you doing, really?’ she asks, dropping her voice, inviting a greater intimacy.

‘Oh, not too bad,’ I say. I adjust my position on the sofa and switch the phone to my other ear. I’m wondering whether to tell her about the times over the last few days when I’ve found myself back kneeling in the wet bracken, searching for the emergency lights in the distance, desperately willing them to appear. These memories feel every bit as sharp and shocking – as full of panic and uselessness – as the reality was. I have the sense the remembered experience is becoming more clearly delineated as the days go on, and I wasn’t expecting that.

The sound of the crying, too, has begun to assail me at unwelcome moments, moments when my mind should be empty, when I’m at my most vulnerable. Late at night as I lie in bed, buried under a comforting weight of blankets, sliding towards sleep. Or early in the morning, long before the grey dawn. I’ve started to wake up very early, and sometimes I can’t be sure whether I’m hearing Alice, or the sound of foxes out in the gardens.

‘Will you just put that back, darling. No: I said, put it back,’ Hester is saying, and the moment passes. She comes back on the line. ‘I must go and start their bath,’ she says. ‘How were Mum and Dad, anyway?’

‘Oh, you know,’ I say. ‘Same old.’

We laugh together, back on more stable territory, and she invites me over for lunch on Saturday. I know I’ll be expected to offer to babysit that evening, as long as I haven’t made other plans; but to be honest a few hours of Playmobil and an M&S curry in front of Charlie’s extravagance of TV channels sounds pretty good right now. There are worse ways to spend a Saturday night. I should know.

Once the call is over, I put a pan of water on the hob. I’m chopping tomatoes for the sauce while the onions and garlic
soften, and the radio is on, and I have a glass of wine, and the flat’s looking nice, everything in its place, and the pendant above the kitchen table is casting a cosy pool of light over the daffodils in the blue jug. Because of the warmth of the kitchen, they’re just starting to shoulder their way out of their frowsty papery cases.

It’s not bad, I think. You’re not so badly off, are you?

A tiny movement outside the kitchen window catches my eye, and I stop and lean over the sink and look out, down on to the street, and I can see – in the illuminated triangles beneath the street lamps – that snow has started to fall, slowly and steadily.

It falls and falls, for days and days. It seems, for a while, that the snow is the only thing happening in the world. It catches London off guard. Buses are left abandoned on roads. Schools are closed. Councils run out of salt. And when I wake up in the morning, my first thoughts are not of Alice, but of hope that the snow is still out there, still working its disruptive, glamorous magic.

On my day off, I walk across the Heath, through a sort of blizzard. All the usual landmarks – the paths, the ponds, the play areas, the running track – are sinking deep beneath lavish drifts. Under a pewter sky, Parliament Hill is glazed with ice. Blinded by flurries, people are tobogganing down it on dustbin lids, carrier bags, tea trays stolen from the cafeteria near the bandstand. The shrieks and shouts fade quickly into insulated silence as I walk on towards the trees, their branches indistinctly freighted with white. Soon the only sounds are the powdery crunch of the snow beneath my boots, the catch of my breath.